'Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams' Drama. Written and directed by Jasmila Zbanic. With Mirjana Karanovic, Luna Mijovic. In Bosnian with English subtitles. (Not rated. 90 mins. At the Lumiere in San Francisco and Shattuck in Berkeley.)

In telling a simple tale -- about a struggling single mother in Sarajevo scraping together money for her daughter's school trip -- "Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams," a moving but flawed premiere feature, reveals a land broken by a ferocious war that, although officially over, still informs every aspect of life.

The Bosnian conflict of the '90s was especially barbarous, marked by ethnic cleansing and the wide-scale employment of rape, torture and other horrors. Writer-director Jasmila Zbanic is especially attuned to female suffering -- the film is bookended with sequences showing group therapy sessions for women traumatized by the conflict.

Among them is Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), whom we see early on applying for a waitress job at a sleazy bar that's also a meeting house for gangsters. She's totally out of place but puts up with the demeaning job for her daughter's sake. The child, Sara (Luna Mijovic), knows that the school outing is expensive but optimistically tells her mother that there is a discount for students who can prove they are the children of "shaheed" (war martyrs). Esma promises to find the needed certificate.

As the two go about their business -- Esma is pursued by one of the bar's more likable tough guys, and Sara's classmates start to doubt that her father was really a hero -- we see the war's effects everywhere: Sarajevo today is a place where burned buildings co-exist with modern shopping malls, and everyone's barely getting by, except maybe for some war veterans who've become thugs. People bond in conversations about husbands and fathers who have been killed or have disappeared, and the government pays a stipend to women to attend grief therapy.

Sara is appealing, a tomboy capable of duking it out with a male bully, with whom she later becomes friends. But signs of damage are unmistakable: When Sara and the boy rendezvous inside a bombed-out building, she whoops with joy when he allows her to fire his deceased father's gun.

As the school trip draws near, Esma, unable to come up with the certificate, is forced into various money-seeking forays. The story builds to a climactic revelation that, unfortunately, comes very late in the game and could have been handled more adroitly.

Still, there's much of value here. The mother and daughter roles are well acted -- the veteran Karanovic is familiar from Emir Kusturica's movies. The portrayal of a wounded society is compelling, and the film ends on a very modestly hopeful note, appropriate for a country where the "dreams" have been mostly painful.

(Grbavica, by the way, is the Sarajevo neighborhood where the mother and daughter live and was the site of an internment camp during the war.)

Note: This film won the Golden Bear (among several awards) at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival, and was the 2006 entry from Bosnia and Herzegovina for the best foreign language film Oscar.

-- Advisory: This film has some offensive language, nudity and violence.

As if to redress the cultural inaccuracies of "Borat," we now have a Russian-made epic on the founding of modern Kazakhstan. "Nomad" is, while not very good, an old-school battle epic (meaning there were real locations and a real cast of thousands used, unlike "300") about the quest, in the 18th century, to unite three warring tribes to form one country.

Any reference to modern-day Iraq is purely unintentional.

"Nomad" is old-school in another way as well. It harks back to those sand-and-sandals epics of the 1950s and '60s, with an international cast speaking in awkwardly dubbed English. (Even the English speakers are awkwardly dubbed. Apparently, like a spaghetti western, the cast members spoke in their own languages and the film was later dubbed -- in Kazakh, for the locals, and other languages for its various international audiences.) Mugging for a paycheck this time are Kuno Becker, the Mexican actor who starred in "Goal! The Dream Begins"; Jay Hernandez ("World Trade Center"); and Jason Scott Lee, whose signature film continues to be "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story."

Lee dominates the film's first half hour, as his character, Oraz, has a divine revelation that the leader who can unite the Kazakh tribes for the first time since Genghis Khan has been born. He corrals the infant savior, rescuing him from a tribal massacre, and raises him as his own. He also takes, with parental permission, the best and the brightest from the three tribes and trains them in what would today be called a terrorist training camp. The difference here is that they are raised as Kazakhs, and not as their various tribal ethnicities.

Eventually, the savior Mansur (Becker) grows up and takes over the movement. His main obstacle is a tribal lord who has kidnapped his girlfriend and captured his best friend (Hernandez). Mansur himself is captured and must go through a strange and not very credible series of tests to prove his worthiness.

By the time the climactic battle to unite the tribes occurs, directors Sergei Bodrov ("Prisoner of the Mountains") and Ivan Passer seem either to have lost interest or run out of money. The battle is ineptly staged and unsatisfying. When combined with a simple-minded script, the battle might have been won, but the war was lost.

Thomas Merton once said D.T. Suzuki was as important to the world as Gandhi, even if Suzuki wasn't nearly as well known. Seeking to correct Suzuki's underexposure, British filmmaker Michael Goldberg has made a straightforward, breezy 77-minute documentary on the Japanese Zen master that, although it seems to be made for television and isn't particularly cinematic, does the job.

Suzuki (1870-1966) was born and raised in Japan but spent significant time in the United States, including when he was in his 20s, and was a professor at Columbia University in the 1950s. One of his many books, "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism," was an international best-seller upon its release in 1934 and has continued in print since. He was the Carl Sagan of Buddhism.

Goldberg has unearthed some nice footage, including speeches by Merton, loads of photographs and an American television special on Suzuki in the 1950s in which the author tries to explain Buddhism. At one time or another, it seems Suzuki met every celebrity who existed in the early part of the 20th century -- he was even considered a mentor by the Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

This was, of course, during the 1950s, when there was an LSD craze among many bohemians and artists. Fascinated, an 85-year-old Suzuki wanted to try the drug, and only a vigorous campaign by his disciples talked him out of it.

For a man who spent a lifetime questioning existence and stressing the impermanence of life, Suzuki has managed to become a permanent part of our culture.

G. Allen Johnson

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